My eyes closed, nearly drifting off to sleep, I startle, awakened by a creaking noise. Is it one of the kids’ doors? Is one of them up, perhaps to go to the bathroom? Listening closer, room still dark, I strain to hear. The noise occurs again, but I can locate it just outside our window. “It’s the blueberry bushes, scratching the house,” I reassure myself. But some part of me doesn’t accept that answer and keeps listening anyway – just in case.

As a child, I never remember being especially afraid of the dark or noises in the night, despite my intense imagination. Shadows and noises startled me, but monsters didn’t creep under the bed or in my closet. My stubbornly logical mind override any belief in them, pushing the thoughts out of my head as soon as they emerged. I simply wouldn’t believe in them. I do remember lying in bed, listening to the rain though. I especially liked listening to the rain when we would camp in our pop-up camper, as it hitting the aluminum roof sounded like the macaroni boiling for my favorite food. Once I fell asleep, I slept like the dead. One time, I even slept through a (very mild) earthquake.

All that changed when I became a mom. My children’s rooms are right next to mine, to the point where I barely needed a baby monitor. Nonetheless, I cranked up the blue glowing rectangle and stuck it next to my pillow. I grew used to the buzz of white noise through a receiver, punctuated by cries.

That monitor got a lot of use those first two years. The constant up and down, up and down of the early months. Then, long past the newborn stage, my older son was still waking up two and three times a night. He wouldn’t go back to sleep on his own either, screaming until you could rock him back to sleep. I was always on high alert, listening for those inevitable wails. My sleep was scattered at best, haunted by phantom cries.

Even when he was asleep, I worried. Was he getting enough sleep? Was something wrong that every sleep training method failed? What was I doing wrong? How many times would he wake up tonight? What did I do that one time he only woke up once? Or that singular time he actually slept through the night?

Eventually, through getting older and a particularly heinous night of cry-it-out, he slept through the night. We repeated the whole process with my younger son, although it was much less difficult.

Now, both of my children are older and only wake in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Most of the time, the fight is about getting them to bed rather than trying to get them to go back to sleep.

And yet, those early days still stick with me. The echoes of a child’s cry when it’s merely the wind. The creaking of a crib when it’s a tree. As a parent, the things that go bump in the night no longer threaten our own safety. Rather, they are our own worries, rooted in our children’s vulnerability and our inability to protect them from it.